Unix was developed as a command line interface in the early 1970s with a very rich command vocabulary. DOS followed more than a decade later for the IBM PC, and DOS commands migrated to Windows.

GUIs are great—we wouldn’t want to live without them. But if you’re a Mac or Linux user and you want to get the most out of your operating system (and your keystrokes), you owe it to yourself to get ...

Click for a PDF with this and four other essential Linux articles. And, if you’ve ever heard anyone say that for Unix, everything is a file, you might not be too surprised to learn that lsof works ...

Delete Backs up to erase one character. Backspace Mapped as a backspace key, displaying ^H. Ctrl-u Erases the command line. Ctrl-w Erases the last word on the command line. Ctrl-s Stops flow of output ...

Topher, an avid Mac user for the past 15 years, has been a contributing author to MacFixIt since the spring of 2008. One of his passions is troubleshooting Mac problems and making the best use of Macs ...

IBM author Michael Stutz lists several ways UNIX users can benchmark and increase their productivity at the command line. One is to use the built in history tool to review what programs you use the ...

Cron is nice and all, but don't forget about its cousin at. When I first started using Linux, it was like being tossed into the deep end of the UNIX pool. You were expected to use the command line ...

A customer account with an Internet service provider (ISP) that requires the user to enter Unix commands to send and receive mail and files. Prior to today's graphical interfaces, Internet access was ...